<<"A salt crystal has around 10 to the 17 possible bits in it," he points
out. "As an
example, let's take your own brain. If I were to use every one of those
spins, the
nuclear spins, in your brain that are currently being wasted and not being
used to
store useful information, we could probably get about 10 to the 28 bits
there."

Sitting with Lloyd in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston, overlooking the
tranquil
Boston Public Gardens, I am suddenly flooded with fantasies of licensing
arrangements regarding the nuclear spins of my brain. No doubt this would
be a
first in distributed computing

Lloyd points out that so far as we know, our brains don't pay any attention
to these
nuclear spins. "You could have a whole parallel computational universe
going on
inside your brain. This is, of course, fantasy. But hey, it might happen."
>>